The Complex Christ | Signs of Emergence

Eels | Quantum Physics | Many Worlds | Meaning

A quite brilliant piece of TV on BBC 4 tonight. Worth the license fee on its own, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives traced the journey of Eels front-man Mark Everett uncovering the life of his father, the eminent physicist Hugh Everett III. Everett Snr, in a radical challenge to the Quantum Mechanical orthodoxy of the day, proposed his 'Many Worlds Interpretation', in which parallel universes split off at each moment of decision. Derided at the time, he became depressed and withdrawn. He died young, and Mark's mother and sister followed soon after, his sister taking her own life, writing in her suicide note that she was 'going to find her father in one of his parallel universes.' He was a hidden man, who rarely spoke at home. It was only a few years before his death that his theory was finally accepted; it is only through this documentary that Mark discovers just how important a figure in science his father was.

And, strangely, I wrote a poem about Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation a few weeks ago. Which it seems timely to put here, and add to the probably already huge canon of poetic works on the subject ;-)

Perhaps I Prefer The Inefficiencies of This Universe
To The Cold Efficiency of Your Myriad Others

Relativity,
Two clocks moving apart
At light speed never separate
And, in time, are forever together.

Yes, Albert,
As soon as you Equalled the product of m and c-squared,
You locked us in:
No information shall travel faster than light,
Yes, our infinity, given a limit:
46.5 billion light years
To the edge
Of us.

But you are there, and I here,
And strangely, from each centre elsewhere,
A new spacetime arcs out,
Socking the eye with an infinite number of
Observable universes.

And thus, inevitably, an infinite number of you.

Some mother said I was unique, but now
A father’s physics wants me to believe in
Another me,
Beginning 10 to the 10
to the 29 metres far away.
Too far, and yet too close,
For my comfort.

Quantum physicist,
Hugh Everett III, what have you done?
“The existence of other universes
is inevitable”
Said your Many Worlds Interpretation,
Which denied too the objective reality
Of wavefunction collapse.

And I’m like, WTF?

You go on:
“Between 0 and 1:
A single random number
With all its infinite decimals,
Is expressed, computationally,
Longer
Than
The computational expression
Of the whole set of numbers
That exist there.”

Meaning?

Apparently this:
A universe of infinite parallels
May be more economic
Than a straight, linear,
Singular
One.

Meaning?

Somewhere you and I are together,
Though, in this universe, we are apart,
And somewhere else there are more in betweens
Than we could ever fathom.
And that may be more efficient
Than this.

And now my gourd is swirling,
Thinking,
What is love, and life and us,
Other than to trust in this membrane-thin world,
And chose to forego
In the infinite possibility
Of the efficient multiverse,
And dig long
And deep
For life,
And love,
In this
One?

Technorati: Eels | Parallel Universe | Everett

Sometimes Facebook Makes You Weep...

Poor thing!

Technorati: Facebook

Kindle | Physicality

I, for one, won't be buying an Amazon 'Kindle', at least for some time yet. I think the prediction of this being 'iPod for books' is way off for the simple reason that the media are totally different. Music is not physical. Sure, you could thumb through the album artwork, and that was a great bonus with a 12" gatefold. But it was always subsiduary to the actual thing: the music. And music is simply to be listened to. In stereo. No more.

With a book, the text is the object. Fine - the text can be inked digitally, but what I don't think can be replicated is the 'flick value' of a book. I never just read a book - I read a bit, flick around, look at the cover again, turn back... It's a much more physical experience than we often think. And I just don't want to give that up.

With music, the emotional centre is the listening. With a book, the whole object - the spine, the binding, the font, the leading, the stock - all of these things are tied up with the emotional content of the actual text.

I read news online. But a novel? Forget it. Won't kindle no spark for me.

ID Cards | Data Protection | Education/Legislation

The Customs and Revenue department announced today that it had somehow 'mislaid' discs containing all of the details of 25 million people in Britain claiming Child Benefit. Personal details, bank details, National Insurance numbers and addresses were all part of the records that went missing in an internal mail delivery.

And this is within a government that wants to spend £5.6bn - three times that much, say experts - on a National Identity Database, linked to ID cards. Well they can bugger off. Quite why I should pay £50 to have a card that is going to cause me grief, leave my ID and details being more open to theft is beyond me. The reasoning is that it will stop terrorism. Ah yes - terror plots like the ones perpetrated by full British citizens Mohammed Siddique Khan et al. It's total nonsense.

With more CCTV cameras per capita than any other nation in the world, with data security breaches like this one part of a pattern of systemic failure of central government to protect information, and with spiraling costs, it seems we are being sleep-walked into a crazy Orwellian world. As I mention in the book, education is always more preferable to legislation. It internalizes the desired effect: I don't commit terrorist acts because I believe they are wrong, not because I'm afraid of being caught.

Imagine £5.6bn - or more like £12bn ring-fenced into community-based education, or programmes to target those most at risk from offending. Surely this would have better outcomes, and leave the rest of the law-abiding society to get on with their business without a camera prying into every damn thing.

Technorati: Child Benefit | Education | HMRC | ID Cards | Orwell | Legislation | Terrorism

In Praise of Eccentricity

Just back from a wonderful weekend in the depths of Wales. I didn't find RS Thomas, or any great rural epiphany, but, in keeping with the joys of weekends in other people's houses, had a great time dipping into some books.

The most enjoyable was Edith Sitwell's English Eccentrics*. It's an eccentric volume itself, but delicious for that difference. The Folio edition I was perusing began with a quote from John Stuart Mill:

"In this age the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time."

The quote comes from his 1859 book 'On Liberty', where he regularly rages against 'custom', believing it leads to conformity, and thus lack of freedom:

"Even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes."

Eccentricity simply means 'having a different centre'. For this reason alone, and with no thought for wanting to be 'quirky' or 'different', I'd like to sing in praise of being eccentric. Within this definition it is only the eccentric who can speak prophetic criticism. It is only the eccentric who can, by the gravity of their thought, draw close and change the orbit of the masses. Bauman writes in Liquid Life of "the mind-boggling quandary of having to mark oneself out as an individual, while also remaining obviously an acceptable part of the group" and it is this pressure that draws us into predictable, one-dimensional orbits. Being such a satellite around such a large mass is safe, yes, but cold and life-less.

The force to break away from this comes in two forms. The greater force, perhaps, is the gravity of the a-centrics, the vacuous cult of celebrity that tempts us with ideas of total freedom: responsibility-free sex, rootless trans-atlantic existence and the exultation of form over content. But nothing can have no centre, save nothing itself.

So it is down to the eccentric, the differently centred, the 'dirty trickster' as my book would have it, to provide some alter-orbit. The physics is clear on this: the closer this eccentric orbit swings to the other mass, the greater its changing effect. Eccentricity is not an excuse for seclusion or flight, but an invitation to challenge the prose-flattened, cathode-ray world with some vital poetry.

[* The book. Not the online fashion store. Urgghhhh.]

Technorati: Eccentricity | Eccentrics | Mill | Sitwell

Digital Obesity | Personal Bandwidth

Apologies for those of you who've been waiting on tenterhooks for the Facebook article I blogged about a while ago (it's OK - I don't really believe that ;-) It got bumped to December's issue, so will be out shortly. I've led two discussion groups recently, one in a crypt, one in a library - go figure - along the same lines as the article, and one of the themes that has come up in discussion both times is that of personal bandwidth, or digital obesity. Check email / check blog / check phone for messages / check other blog / check Facebook / check work email... hell, you could spend all day checking devices. And that's before you've even tried to get them synced.

I've met about 10 or 15 people this month who've talked - to use this metaphor - about dieting. Just trying to thin out the time they spend online checking stuff. Some have closed Facebook accounts, others have deleted messaging services. All are trying to spend more time with actual people. And, to be honest, I've been doing the same. (Though, ironically, I've just met a wonderful blogger who lives in the next road)

I wonder what our kids will be doing when they get to the age of virtual communication. Will the childhood obesity problem hit their bandwidth as well as their waistbands? Or will things have become more integrated? I'm thinking it may be a bit of both, but I'm always pleased when some integration technology makes things easier now. Like Gmail doing IMAP. Or Bento - this new offering from Filemaker that is a one-stop database for all your contacts, events etc.. Looks good.

Either way, I think my thesis in the article still holds: we are desperate for connection, and will get it down wires if we don't get it down the street. Question is how much of which is healthy.

Technorati: Bento | Facebook | GMail | IMAP

Howies: Tales of the City

OK, so Howies opened a store in Carnaby Street - their first in London. Which is great. I hope they do well. But I have to admit their attitude to the city - and to London in particular - has been mostly negative. Indeed, their catalogues in the past have regularly been virtual tracts for country-side life, waxing lyrically about how fabulous it is to live by fields and go biking in the woods at lunch time. Which it is. Trouble is, the vast majority of their customers don't live this life, and it sort of pisses me off when they so blatantly bite the hand that feeds them.

Of course, many of their more vitriolic rants against the city ("We're flying in and out for a day - it's all we can cope with! - to do our sale" etc.) have been removed from their site - although one raging against big money remains, which I hope their new owners Timberland don't mind about.

As I say, I hope Howies do well. I love their products and the rest of their ethos. But it's an attitude to the city that is quite prevalent: we'll go on and on about how shit it is, about how noisy and how grey and how unfriendly and how violent - but hell, it's where the money is, so we'll happily plunder it for its wealth.

I love the countryside - I'm off to darkest Wales this weekend - but let's not pit city and country against one another. Everything in the city is raw material from the countryside - rock, stone, ore - that has been processed by human hands into metal, glass, brick. But where is virgin countryside now? Everywhere has been managed. Everywhere has our fingerprints on it. We simply need to ensure that those prints are lightly made.

Technorati: Howies | London | City

In The Shadow of The Moon

In The Shadow Of The Moon is a magnificent movie. No voice-over. No animation. No mock-ups. Just archive footage, and interviews with the Apollo astronauts. It's stunning as a film, stunning to be reminded of perhaps the single greatest technological feat of mankind, and stunning to be reminded - in a way Gore never quite achieves in AIT - that the earth really is immensely precious. Armstrong's continued absence from any documentary - literary or on film - only serves to add mystery to an already ethereal and epiphanic event. He was the first to step out onto another world; what God whispered to him before leaving for someplace else he will continue to keep to himself.

If, you're in London, you'll have to catch it soon, as it's been on a scandalously limited release. If you miss it, buy the DVD, with the largest screen you can lay your hands on. Or, better still, read Andrew Smith's 'Moondust' - which very likely inspired the film.

Technorati: Al Gore | Andrew Smith | In The Shadow of The Moon | Moondust | Neil Armstrong

11/11

Technorati: Memory | Remembrance | War

American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America

Very interesting article by Nicholas Guyett, around Chris Hedges' book in the current issue of the London Review of Books. Hedges was a theology student, and is also a very experienced war reporter.

Well worth a read, or buy the book here.

"According to Hedges, we may be only one cataclysmic event away from a total reordering of American politics and a takeover by the theocrats. Many of the Christian conservatives I spoke to last year fully expect another 9/11, but their gloomy view of the future has more to do with Ezekiel than the Fox News Channel."

Technorati: Christian Right | Fascism | Fox News | Hedges | 9/11

Storyquest | Lara Croft is no Wise Guide | Antisocial Behaviour

Storyquest is the national festival of story-telling and the spoken word, and runs for the whole of November. Alongside many keynote events, the organizers - the Prince of Wales' Foundation for Children & the Arts - are simply encouraging families to 'fill their homes with stories, capturing the moment when a story gets inside you and fires the imagination.'

One idea they have is to simply open an old photo album and start talking about the people within it - whether alive or dead. Doing exactly this is something I remember fondly from my own childhood.

With the heavy-handed 'National Literacy Strategy', story-telling has been rather gutted of its emotional heart. Reading is to be 'done' and stories are to be studied. This is a tragedy, not simply for the pure enjoyment of stories, but because - as Christopher Booker argues in The Seven Basic Plots - it is stories that forge our emotional and spiritual development. Remove them and you stunt growth and maturity.

Of course, people will argue that stories still abound in childhood. What is Lara Croft other than a story animated and controlled by the player? True. But the issue is the commonality. A child playing alone at a computer is in control of their own story. Left alone to navigate a world with no narrator or guide. And this, I am convinced, leads to a wounded and insecure heart that finds love and grace and appreciation of the other difficult. In other speak, it contributes to anti-social behaviour.

So turn the screen off, go grab a book, an album, or just your imagination, and tell someone a story. The fire is lit.

Technorati: Antisocial Behaviour | Arcade Game | Christopher Booker | Gaming | Lara Croft | Prince of Wales | Story-telling | Storyquest

Proximity | Escatology | SpaceTime Collapse

Last night I went to see Iron and Wine at the Shepherd's Bush Empire, where we were up in the gods rather; the night before I'd been looking for some theatre tickets for a Christmas show, and was shocked at how much it was going to cost to be anywhere near where we might see.

The brilliant folky-dub got me thinking about ideas of proximity, and the value we place on it. Being physically near costs. If you want to be at the front, within touching distance, you are going to have to pay a huge amount more. Sitting near the front of a meeting says something; the physical layout of the space insists on it. Most of us are left wallowing at the back, with restricted views.

And somehow my mind skipped to the second coming; it struck me that one of the most powerful arguments against a standard physical interpretation of the second coming is this idea of limited proximity. We couldn't all get anywhere near close. Rich and powerful Jews like Maxwell get buried in the hugely costly cemetery on the Mount of Olives outside of Jerusalem, overlooking the spot where Elijah is meant to return, and one feels that there would be a similar stampede for wherever the JesusShip™ decided to land.

We used to joke back in old-church about good deeds pushing you forward a couple of rows. No. Whatever we might think about eschatology, or post-life experience, SpaceTime must collapse, and ideas of distance and proximity will be irrelevant.

Strange where thoughts take you when you're tired at a wonderful gig.

Technorati: Escatology | Iron and Wine | Jerusalem | Proximity | Robert Maxwell | Shepherds Bush